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Chapter 1. Introduction
Facebook users spend time browsing through funny images and videos and support their favorite brand by joining some brand communities to be fed with the latest information and viral pictures. Recently, the emergence of the 360-degree picture on Facebook has guided the users to step into the scene, making people feel more immersive than the conventional picture. The 360-degree picture builds the scene surrounding the audience, and the audience can interact with the picture. The users of social media sites have started to embrace the new way of sharing life memories, but there is less discussion about how the feature of the interactive 360-degree picture on Facebook may satisfy the user's psychological needs, determining their usage patterns.
This study examines the interactivity of the 360-degree feature and explores whether it can prompt users to participate in the brand-related activity in the context of social media-based brand community.
1.1 360-degree picture on social media
National Geographic's Facebook Fan Page has published a post of 360-degree video since 2016: getting closer to the brown bears in the wildlife from the angle of being in the center of the river. The post has gone viral with more than one hundred thousand sharing, twenty-two thousand likes, and ten thousand comments, the users praising the immersive feeling that 360-degree technology has achieved. There is also a Facebook Fan Page, Facebook 360, aiming at discovering 360-degree videos and photos, including the topics of art, nature, sports, travel, and VR game. Even though Facebook has allowed users to upload interactive 360-degree picture and video, the feature is still not as popular as the conventional picture and video when it comes to the user's daily usage habits and marketing. For example, in the campaign of the 360-degree sportive camera, Gopro recommended the users to share user-generated content (UGC).
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However, most of the uploaded videos are shot with the 360-degree camera but edited into the flat video, which has framed the audience's viewing angles without any interactivity. The technology of 360-degree images has not convinced the marketers and general users on Facebook due to the cost of taking 360-degree pictures. Taking the 360-degree picture requires either a panoramic camera (e.g., Insta 360, GoPro, Richo Theta, Samsung Gear 360) or holding a mobile device for a longer second to capture the environment. However, with the trend of more immersive advanced technology, from Google cardboard to virtual reality headsets, the users are pursuing the immersive entertainment experience from high pixel fix-angle convention pictures to the interactive 360-degree picture. As a result, it is necessary to conduct an in-depth analysis to understand whether Facebook user's interactive image viewing engagement is related to the nuanced psychological change in the hope of providing insights and prediction for future 360-degree technology development and application.
1.2 Social media-based brand community
The social media-based brand community constructs consumers' relationships with the brand, product, company, and other consumers (Habibi, Laroche, & Richard, 2014).
Customers are interested in exposing themselves to the contents produced by the brand and product usage experiences shared by the other customers. Community engagement refers to the consumer's identification with the brand community, and highly engaged consumers have "intrinsic motivation to interact and cooperate with community members" (Algesheimer, Dholakia, & Herrmann, 2005, p.21). The community members voluntarily interact on social media with the activity of sharing pictures, videos, liking, and commenting on the posts.
This study focuses on the Gogoro Fan Club, an electric scooter Facebook club. Most of the members in this online fan club have purchased Gogoro. There is various type of
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contents shared on this social media-based brand community, including organizing a face-to-face trip regularly and holding the brand event. The posts can accumulate hundreds of likes, and some of them will go viral on media, triggering the users to generate more contents that keep the community vibrant. What's more, those posts have symbolized a fun brand image, which is co-created by the community members. The users can identify with the product, brand, and other community members throughout their interaction on social media. Their community engagement can differentiate from those who read and like the posts to those who participate in the offline rider's community activity. Even though it is evident that the post’s content has an impact on the user's identification with the brand community, there is a scarce discussion about the form of content on social media. Therefore, this study investigates how the form of the 360-degree picture on social media can enhance the user’s media enjoyment and behavioral change.
The results of this study are expected to provide a practical explanation to the current phenomenon on Facebook, which the emergence of 360-degree picture features can deem as either interesting or superfluous, depending on how the audiences perceive the content (Gambino, Kim, & Sundar, 2017). The paper is organized as follows. First, the interactivity of the 360-degree picture is defined, comparing to the conventional picture.
Second, self-determination theory is employed to explicate the online user's psychological mechanisms toward the interactive 360-degree picture in the context of the social media-based brand community, and the third section shows the proposed method and measures to explore this issue.
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國立 政 治 大 學